Ready, Set, Hike!

Several months ago I asked a a niece of mine to take me on a summit hike in the Philippines. "Yes," she replied. She added, it's not cake walk, so you better start training by running for two hours everyday!

Jimminy Chirstmas!

Two hours?!

Running?!

Everyday?!

Is she serious?!

Well, regrettably, this niece no longer lives in the Philippines. However, I have started to get serious about getting back into physical shape, and have logged two long hikes to my training log. The first hike was Mount Si, about an hour and a half out of the city.

It was a round trip of eight miles, and we did it in about four hours. It normally takes a little over two hours to complete this hike. It took us twice as long for these reasons:

1. I had already run 5 miles that morning.
2. Alfonsina was carrying a fifty pound pack
    (conditioning for a sixty-plus mile trek
    through the Sierra Nevada range.
3. Colleen had a torn muscle in her rib cage.
4. It was a scorching hot day, with not a
    wisp of a breeze in the air.



My  next hike was an "accident". We had planned on Bandera Mountain, but the access road was closed due to logging. So we picked the next trailhead off the Interstate... Mailbox Peak, so aptly named with the mail box perched at its summit.

This hike is a round trip of six miles, but it took us over four hours to do it because:

1. A sheer (no pun intended) gain in elevation,
    with a total elevation of 4,100 feet. Imagine
    climbing about 1,000 feet per mile.
2. Alfonsina carried a thirty-pound pack (still
    in training).

And in addition to these hikes, I was running four miles a day, three days a week for the last two weeks. I'm now up to six miles a day, three days a week.

So, if and when my niece returns to the Philippines, I'll be ready for sure!

.